The official Medium account of Next Impulse Sports - Time Magazine's 50 Best Websites of 2012.

May 4, 2015

These Houston Rockets Playoff Tees Make No Damn Sense

The Houston Rockets may have submitted a convincing 4–1 series win over the Dallas Mavericks in the first round of the NBA Playoffs, but the team’s performance from a marketing perspective has gotten off on the wrong foot. It started with an innocuous tweet in the waning moments of the Mavs series, which led to the firing of the Rockets’ social media manager last week.

The latest slip-up comes merely hours before the Rockets’ first round match-up against the Los Angeles Clippers on Monday night. The seats at the Toyota Center are draped in red shirts, with a checklist running down the team’s accomplishments this season: Southwest Division Champions (check), Western Conference semifinals…hold on a second, what happened to the first round? Was that series win not worthy of a mention on the t-shirt?

Also, it seems a little odd to put a check mark next to the Western semis, considering not a single game has been played yet. Unless getting to the Western semis is the accomplishment (again, weird). We’re not done here: the conference finals are listed, but not the NBA Finals. In other words, according to this t-shirt, the Rockets are convinced they’ll beat the Clippers, but don’t stand a chance in the conference finals. Great message.